User experience analysis of Facebook dating site design

Related articles: Comments on Facebook's information architecture

Original: http://www.chouyu.com.cn/?p=102

Why is it easier to make friends on Facebook? What is the difference between Facebook and the traditional BSP (Blog Service Provider)? Is it because it has two navigation? Is it because it has an aggregation page of master information? Why did Facebook succeed? And what are the disadvantages? Facebook's commercial success has made it a messy design for the emperor's new clothes, even if he doesn't understand it. Let's take a look at the numerous visual manifestations on the Web, to see the skeleton behind the Web-information architecture (IA information Architecture), and we'll get a whole new perspective, and all these questions will be solved.

Traditional blog service Providers (blog Services Provider, referred to as BSP), such as: Qzone, Sina blog, netease blog ... They provide a blog service, not only for each registered user to provide a blog for their own space, there is a platform for the exchange of Bloger between the two. In other words, the information architecture is: Personal space + Community platform.

What does "personal space + Community platform" look like?
Each blog is independent of each other, and then by a community platform will these blog aggregation together, through the content aggregation together.

The first in the upper-left corner represents the host state, where the owner can see all the services provided by the BSP, where B, D, and e are already used by him.
And the following is the other people's blog, Other people's blog contains different content, and some used a photo album, some used a log, some use the video ... At present, most of the BSP are simple to the abcdef are simply presented to the guests, regardless of the owner use.
The right half of the picture is a community platform, with content as the dimension, displaying content, and then displaying users. For example, a on behalf of the log, the Community platform will have a log column, which shows a lot of interesting logs, to see this log, it reached another person's blog. Communication is realized, the so-called platform, the value is this.

The original blog is a separate, with the BSP to provide blog services, before the emergence of a community platform, so that users can more easily find other people. Not only oneself to others to see, more can use convenient to find like-minded people, let many bloger form a community.

This structure has the advantage of :

1. Structure is clear. When I say this structure, you will understand. Guess I don't say, you can understand.
2. The expansion is easy. This is for the BSP. To add a new service that can be divided into two steps, providing functionality in a personal blog is a step, providing communication on a community platform is another step, and if you have limited development resources, you don't have to do it at the same time. For example, to provide a video service, you can first in the personal space for each user to upload, display video function, temporary community platform does not have the content of the aggregation of video does not matter, and so have the energy to do it later.

disadvantages of this "personal + Community Platform" model :

The communication between each blog is more difficult. Each blog belongs to the individual, from a blog to enter another blog has two ways:
1. Through the blog of Friends, the name of the author of the message. I left a comment in a blog, read this message to the person can be through the message of the author's name into my blog.
2. A link to the top of the page similar to "entering the Community platform".
The energy of these two channels is very limited. The friend in the space is the owner adds himself. This space master if the popularity of poor, no friends, no one left a message, the first road is gone. "Enter the community platform" link is just a link, before the point of nothing to see, why do I go to point? What's so interesting about it?

This is the information architecture of the traditional BSP. To figure this out, let's look at another new structure-facebook, MySpace ... 's architecture.